THE EASE & JOY OF MORNINGS (December 2018)

Join Kozan for “Ease and Joy of Mornings,” December 16—a quiet morning designed to introduce you to the art of zazen. It is an ideal entryway for beginners and even intermediate or long-time meditators who want a refresher course on this “dharma gate of joy and ease” as described by Zen Master, Dogen-Zenji.

Fleet Maull & Joan Halifax: Dharma on the Edge Part 3 of 10

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Roshi begins by reading a letter to Fleet from Jimmy Santiago Baca. Fleet continues to explore the first tenet, “not knowing” and leads participants in a powerful guided exercise.

This episode (#3 of 10) is a continuation of episode #2, i.e., from Fri Aug 6th morning session and is the part after the break.

Roshi Fleet Maull, PhD, is an author, meditation teacher, management consultant, end of life care educator and social activist working for peace, prison reform and social transformation. He is an empowered senior meditation and Dharma teacher in both the Tibetan and Zen Buddhist traditions, as an acharya in the Shambhala Community and a roshi in the Zen Peacemaker Community.

Fleet is a Dharma successor of Zen master and social entrepreneur, Roshi Bernie Glassman, and both a roshi and senior priest in the Zen Peacemaker Community and the Soto Zen lineage of Maezumi Roshi. Fleet completed his senior priest ordination with Roshis Joan Halifax and Pat Enkyo O'Hara. As a Zen peacemaker, Fleet served as a spirit holder of the annual Bearing Witness retreat at Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland from 2001 to 2014. He co-founded the Rwanda Bearing Witness Retreat and leads street retreats in major urban centers.

Fleet founded both Prison Dharma Network (now Prison Mindfulness Institute) and National Prison Hospice Association while serving a 14-year mandatory-minimum sentence on drug charges in federal prison from 1985 to 1999. Fleet helped start the first hospice program inside an American prison, initiating a prison hospice movement that now includes over 70 hospice programs in U.S. state and federal prisons. He also led a twice weekly meditation group at the prison for 14 years. Prison Mindfulness Institute is a leading provider of evidenced-based mindfulness programming in the criminal justice field and hosts a network over 185 organizations and over 2500 individual members working to bring meditation and transformation to the lives of prisoners and correctional workers throughout the U.S. and abroad.

Fleet served on the Naropa University faculty from 1995 to 2009, where he taught courses in psychology, meditation, socially engaged Buddhism and contemplative and integral approaches to social action, peacemaking, and political science. He founded the Center for Contemplative End of Life Care Programs at Naropa University, served as senior faculty with the Upaya Institute's Being with Dying program and as co-founded the Upaya Institute's Buddhist Chaplaincy Training Program.

Fleet also co-founded and directs the Engaged Mindfulness Institute, training professionals and paraprofessionals in the criminal justice, social services, education and medical fields in trauma-informed approaches to sharing the practice of mindfulness with at-risk individuals, vulnerable populations and underserved communities. The Engaged Mindfulness Institute also hosts bearing witness retreats and street retreats in places of deep suffering throughout the world.

Fleet leads meditation retreats, leadership and activist trainings, bearing witness retreats and street retreats throughout North America, Europe, Africa and Latin America, where he also visits prisons and jails doing transformational work with both prisoners and prison staff. He is a frequent presenter at conferences on mindfulness, prison work, end of life care, peacemaking and socially engaged spirituality. His peacemaking activities range from the streets of U.S. cities, to former concentration camps in Poland, to Rwanda and Israel-Palestine, and the forgotten world inside our jails and prisons. Fleet is the author of Dharma in Hell, the Prison Writings of Fleet Maull, numerous articles and book chapters in the fields of corrections and end of life care. and the forthcoming Radical Responsibility: How to Move Beyond Blame, Fearlessly Live Your Highest Purpose and Become an Unstoppable Force for Good (Sounds True, spring 2019). He has been interviewed widely in the radio, online and print media, including National Public Radio's Fresh Air program and the nationally syndicated E-Town.

Roshi Joan Halifax, PhD, is a Buddhist teacher, Zen priest, anthropologist, and author. She is Founder, Abbot, and Head Teacher of Upaya Zen Center, a Buddhist monastery in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She received her Ph.D in medical anthropology in 1973. She has lectured on the subject of death and dying at many academic institutions, including Harvard Divinity School and Harvard Medical School, Georgetown Medical School, University of Virginia Medical School, Duke University Medical School, University of Connecticut Medical School, among many others. She received a National Science Foundation Fellowship in Visual Anthropology, and was an Honorary Research Fellow in Medical Ethnobotany at Harvard University. From 1972-1975, she worked with psychiatrist Stanislav Grof at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center on pioneering work with dying cancer patients, using LSD as an adjunct to psychotherapy. After the LSD project, she has continued to work with dying people and their families and to teach health care professionals as well as lay individuals on compassionate care of the dying. She is Director of the Project on Being with Dying and Founder of the Upaya Prison Project that develops programs on meditation for prisoners. For the past forty years, she has been active in environmental work. She studied for a decade with Zen Teacher Seung Sahn in the Kwan Um Zen School. She received the Lamp Transmission from Thich Nhat Hanh, and was given Inka by Roshi Bernie Glassman.

A Founding Teacher of the Zen Peacemaker Order and founder of Prajna Mountain Buddhist Order, her work and practice for more than four decades has focused on engaged Buddhism. Her books include: The Human Encounter with Death (with Stanislav Grof); The Fruitful Darkness, A Journey Through Buddhist Practice; Simplicity in the Complex: A Buddhist Life in America; Being with Dying: Cultivating Compassion and Wisdom in the Presence of Death; and, Standing at the Edge: Finding Freedom Where Fear and Courage Meet.